When I reached the bike I kept walking on into the slum. I wasn't sure why. I was following an instinct, and drawn, perhaps, by the swollen moon. The narrow lanes, those writhing alleys of struggle and dream, were so familiar to me and so comfortingly safe that I marvelled at the fear I'd once felt there. I wandered without purpose or plan, and moved from smile to smile as men and women and children who'd been my patients and neighbours looked up to see me pass. I moved in mists of cooking scent and shower soap, of animal stalls and kerosene lamps, of frankincense and sandalwood streaming upward from a thousand tiny temples in a thousand tiny homes.
At a corner of one lane I bumped into a man, and as our faces rose to their apologies we recognised one another in the same instant. It was Mukesh, the young thief who'd helped me in the Colaba lock-up and the Arthur Road jail: the man whose freedom I'd demanded when Vikram had paid me out of prison.
"Linbaba!" he cried, seizing my upper arms in his hands. "So good to see you! Arrey! What's happening?"
"I'm just visiting," I answered, laughing with him. "What are you doing here? You look great! How the hell are you?"
"No problem, baba! Bilkul fit, hain!" I'm absolutely fit!
"Have you eaten? Will you take chai?"
"Thank you, baba, no. I am late for a meeting."
"_Achcha?" I muttered. Oh, yes?
He leaned in close to whisper.
"It is a secret, but I know I can trust you, Linbaba. We are meeting with some of those fellows who are with Sapna, the king of thieves."
"What?"
"Yes," he whispered. "These fellows, they actually know that Sapna. They speak to him almost of every day."
"That's not possible," I said.
"Oh yes, Linbaba. They are his friends. And we are making the army-the army of poor fellows. We will teach those Muslims who is the real boss here in Maharashtra! That Sapna, he killed the mafia boss, Abdul Ghani, in his own mansion, and put the pieces of his body all around his house! And the Muslims, after that they are learning how to fear us. I must go now. We will see us, before too much time, isn't it? Goodbye, Linbaba!"
He ran off through the lanes. I turned away, to walk unsmiling into a sudden mood that was anxious and angry and forlorn. And then, as it always did, the city, Bombay, my Mumbai, held me up on the broad back of a nourishing constancy. I found myself at the edge of a devoted crowd gathered before the new, large hut belonging to the Blue Sisters. Men and women stood at the rear of the crowd, while others sat or knelt in a semi-circle of soft light at the threshold of the hut. And there in the doorway, framed by haloes of lamplight and wreathed about with streamers of blue incense smoke, were the Blue Sisters themselves. Radiant.
Serene. Beings of such lambent compassion, such sublime equanimity, that in my broken, exiled heart I pledged to love them, as every man and woman who saw them did.
At that moment I felt a tug at my shirtsleeve and I turned my head to see what seemed to be the ghost of a gigantic smile with a very small man attached to it. The ghost shook me, grinning happily, and I reached out to enclose it in a hug and then bent forward quickly to touch its feet, in the traditional greeting to a father or mother. It was Kishan, Prabaker's father. He explained that he was in the city for a holiday with Rukhmabai, Prabaker's mother, and Parvati, his widow.
"Shantaram!" he admonished me when I started speaking to him in Hindi. "Have you forgotten all your lovely Marathi?"
"Sorry, father!" I laughed, switching to Marathi. "I'm just so happy to see you. Where is Rukhmabai?"
"Come!" he answered, taking my hand as if I was a child, and leading me through the slum.
We arrived at the little group of huts, including my own, that clustered around Kumar's chai shop near the crescent of the sea.
Johnny Cigar was there, with Jeetendra, Qasim Ali Hussein, and Joseph's wife, Maria.
"We were just talking about you!" Johnny cried as I shook hands and nodded my greetings. "We were just saying that your hut is empty again-and we were remembering the fire, on that first day.
It was a big one, na?"
"It was," I muttered, thinking of Raju and the others who'd died in that fire.
"So, Shantaram," a voice scolded in Marathi from behind me, "now you are too big a fellow to speak to your simple village mother?"
I swung round to see Rukhmabai standing close to us. I bent to touch her feet, but she restrained me, and joined her hands together in a greeting. She looked sadder and older within the soft endearments of her smile, and grieving had put a swipe of grey in the black pelt of her hair. But the hair was growing back. The long hair I'd seen falling like a shadow dying was growing back, and there was living hope in the thick, upward sweep of it.
